LAST WEEK Ed Miliband was celebrating the news that wind power had overtaken gas as the biggest source of Britain’s electricity last year.
Three days later the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero was missing in action when we nearly ran out of electricity.
At 5.30pm last Wednesday, January 8, demand for power rose to over 47GW as the nation shivered. At the same time, low winds meant that wind power sank to just 2.6GW, about a quarter of the usual output.
All our gas, nuclear and biomass plants worked flat out, and the interconnectors to the continent were also maxed out. Even then NESO, the National Energy System Operator responsible for maintaining supply of electricity, warned that Britain only had 0.6GW of reserves. If just one gas plant or interconnector had tripped out, rolling blackouts would have followed.
Surprisingly the media were slow in picking up this story, while NESO waffled that there was nothing to worry about and everything was under control. It took the independent energy consultant Kathryn Porter to bring the news to the public’s attention. You can read her detailed analysis here.
How did we get into this mess? It was not even that wind power was ultra-low – it has often run at less than 1GW for days on end. The answer of course is obvious. As many experts have been warning for years, we have shut down more than 20GW of coal power, and replaced it with a medieval technology that works only when the wind blows. But nobody in the media seems to have spotted the elephant in the room!
As we are forced to transition to electric cars and heat pumps, demand for electricity will remorselessly increase. By 2030, according to official projections from the National Grid, peak demand will be 65GW, not 47GW as now. By 2035, it is set to grow to 81GW. Yet there are no plans to build any more gas power stations and Hinkley Point C, under construction and not expected to deliver any power before 2029 at the earliest, will barely offset the closure of older nuclear plants. As for Miliband’s plans to triple wind power, three times nothing is still nothing.
Kathryn Porter points out why we cannot rely on importing power from Europe. The National Grid does not control the flow of electricity through the interconnectors, nor is there any contract with other countries to supply. Instead electricity is bought and sold by electricity market traders, which may even lead to power being exported instead. It is all based around price, meaning that electricity will go to the highest bidder. And there is certainly nothing to stop a country like France simply turning off their end of the interconnector on a whim.
Ed Miliband’s obsession with wind power is leading us ever closer to disaster.
Why Los Angeles is burning
A LOT has been said about the catastrophic fires in Los Angeles this month. Laura covered many of the issues this week, including lack of water, poor governance, cutting of fire brigade budgets and so on.
However it is worth dealing with claims that climate change has brought drought and consequently made wildfires worse.
The reality is that the last two years in California have been wetter than normal:
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/climate-at-a-glance/national/time-series
Nor is there any evidence that droughts are getting worse. Moreover reconstructions have shown that droughts in California have been much worse than now for most of the last millennium.
https://statesummaries.ncics.org/chapter/ca
The simple fact is that California is always hot and dry, a tinderbox waiting to be lit. The Native Americans knew that full well. That is why they managed the land properly, something the Europeans failed to do when they arrived. The University of California published a detailed study on the topic three years ago, called How the Indigenous practice of ‘good fire’ can help our forests thrive.
To quote: ‘Two hundred years ago, someone walking through Yosemite would not have seen the densely packed forests we now associate with the Sierra Nevada. They would have passed through broad meadows and perhaps have even been drawn to comment, as the Spanish did, on how the land appeared like a “well-tended garden”.
‘In fact, that is exactly what Spaniards were seeing: Indigenous people native to Yosemite and other parts of the world for millennia have used fire to promote healthy forests. Today, the wisdom of that approach is seen as one of the keys to unraveling the deadly cycle of California wildfires.
‘It’s easy to assume that the impenetrable forests we associate with the mountains of California have always been there. Many of the popular images of Yosemite, for example, were taken decades after federal agencies moved to suppress fires in the region and removed native tribes.
‘But ecological records and oral Indigenous history alike describe how fire, sparked by lightning or planned by tribes, played a vital role in shaping California’s landscape for thousands of years. A recent UC Berkeley study found that forest biomass in the Klamath Mountains region used to be approximately half of what it is now, and that burns carried out by the Karuk and Yurok tribes played a significant role in maintaining forest structure and biodiversity.
‘The landscapes tribes in California cultivated were diverse, including foothills, woodlands and forest. Goode describes how, as a result of Indigenous land management, Spaniards were able to travel for over 60 miles under a canopy of mostly water oaks, a shade tree that produces abundant acorns, and how early Euro Americans found wide open pathways into Yosemite.
‘But early European settlers who set foot in California saw tribes setting fire to the land and regarded it as primitive. Strangers to the ecosystem and fire’s role within it, they suppressed the practice. In 1850, California passed the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, which outlawed intentional burning in the newly formed state. One early US forest ranger suggested people who set fire to the land should be shot.’
At least there used to be plenty of logging in the early days of European settlers, but even that has been largely stopped in the name of environmentalism. Nor is there the systematic clearance of undergrowth that is needed.
Whether climate change is having an effect or not is irrelevant. There is nothing we can do about it anyway. But there are a lot of other things we can and should be doing instead.
